Publications by David Smith
Because it’s Friday: How Machines Work
Ever wondered how a sewing machine seemingly manages to knot stitches without ever releasing the thread? Well, wonder no more: Find this and other animations of marvels of engineering, including the universal velocity joint and the rotary engine, at the link below.World Of Technology: Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple animations (via...
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Wanted: R Analysis of New Scientist Covers
Peter Aldhous and Jim Giles — from New Scientist's San Francisco bureau — are looking for a statistician and R user to take part in an interesting data analysis challenge, and also be part of a future article in the magazine. They were inspired by this rather tongue-in-cheek presentation where Sebastian Wernicke analyzed videos, transcript...
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R is indispensable, because it’s reproducible
Maria Wolters, self-styled “Science-Mum of two” and speech and language technology researcher, has a great blog post about the one tool she couldn't live without: R. Maria says R is her “favourite tool for analysing experimental results and modelling the resulting patterns of behaviour and preferences”, and explains why: R is a programmi...
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How to generate correlated random numbers
We've covered how to generate random numbers in R before, but what if you want to go beyond generating one random number at a time? What if you want to generate two, or three or more random numbers, and what's more, you want them to be correlated?JD Long lays out the way in a couple of posts at his Cerebral Mastication blog. If you want to genera...
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New R User Group in New Jersey
Folks in the New Jersey area no longer need to trek over to New York City to meet other R users. Now there's NewJerseyR, a new R user group put together by Mango Solutions. The first meeting will in Iselin on September 16, with speakers from Mango, Pfizer, and Bristol Myers Squibb. Full details at the NewJerseyR website, linked below.NewJerseyR: ...
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Competition: Data Visualization with ggplot2
The ggplot2 package for R is an amazing system for creating entirely new visualizations of data. It allows data analysts to tell a detailed, meaningful and yet easy-to-interpret story about complex and/or unusual data sets. To promote more data stories being told, ggplot2 author Hadley Wickham has organized a ggplot2 case study competition. Si...
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Barchart or Dotchart?
Which of the following two charts (both created with R) to you prefer? This dotchart: Or this bar chart? Andrew Gelman (who, incidentally, is speaking at the October NYC UseR meeting) prefers the dotchart prefers a line plot (update: see Gelman's comment, below), but personally I think the bar chart is more easily interpreted. What do you th...
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Revolution R Enterprise 4.0 free download for academics
The Windows version of our latest enterprise distribution of R, Revolution R Enterprise 4.0, is now being delivered to subscribers and is also available for free download for members of the academic community. Revolution R Enterprise 4.0 is a major update, and includes many new and improved features: Based on R 2.11.1, the current release of the�...
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Webinar September 22: Deploying R
In 2 weeks, on Wednesday September 22, I'll be hosting a webinar in conjunction with Andrew Lampitt at Jaspersoft. This new webinar is all about how to Deploy R: in other words, how to use the new server-based capabilities of Revolution R Enterprise 4 for Linux to embed the results of R scripts into applications and web pages. One very cool examp...
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What can other languages learn from R?
At the ASA Statistical Computing Award ceremony in Vancouver last month, R's co-creator Ross Ihaka said that R began as a “system that was functional and well-designed, and made it easy and fun for other people to help”. R's other co-creator, Robert Gentleman, also described the ability of others to contribute as “the exit strategy” that ...
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